Khulisa’s most recent blog post describes our process for designing and conducting a large, complex performance audit (PA) for the Scaling Up Nutrition Learning and Evaluation (SUN LE) project, a multisectoral nutrition program evaluation in Zambia.
Our previous two #EvalTuesdayTips discussed the importance of a PA’s design phase and how to develop good performance standards for a PA. But as with any project, the effectiveness of the SUN LE PA depended on the effectiveness of the people who carried it out. The Khulisa team made a concerted effort to hire and train only the best assessors to implement this large, complex performance audit.
“The assessor determines the question’s rubric score based on the respondent’s answers and the evidence given. It’s not an interview in the sense that you just record what people are telling you,” says Mary Pat Selvaggio, director of the SUN LE PA. “Because you’re interviewing [respondents] and making a judgement on their answers, the capacity or the skills of the assessors is the basis of the data collected.”
All the SUN LE assessors were highly qualified professionals with master’s degrees; and most of the assessors hired for the 2020 PA returned for the PA in 2022. The Khulisa team also worked during the first two rounds of the PA to improve the assessors’ performance, reinforcing the need for assessors to enter detailed comments into the data collection tool during interviews.
To learn more about the SUN LE PA project, read the full blog post.